Today, I posted a letter!!!

Going out for the first time in seven weeks was quite an experience. The nearest sensation to it I have felt in my life was that of stepping from a ship onto dry land. It’s no exaggeration to say I felt not quite steady on my feet and as though I might collapse and fall. I had intended to aim for natural beauty in St. James’s Park but discovered, as a true urbanite, that what I really wanted to see were our Soho playgrounds.

The first shock was not empty streets but boarded up frontages. I had no idea the Dean St. Town House, whose staff feel like family, where I ran when evacuated from home on the day a WW11 bomb was discovered on a building site next door to our apartment, where we have spent some of our happiest, most raucous times with friends and with each other, now turns a blank face to the street along with The Groucho Club and Cote.

Curiously, I have spent a surprising amount of my Lockdown time thinking about the brightly- painted doughnut shop that opened barely a week before we self-isolated.

Who are the owners? Will it survive? How excellent that they didn’t spell it “Donut”. We have watched so many small businesses come and go since we’ve lived here. It’s heartbreaking to see proud owners standing in the street, hands on hips, surveying their brave new world, and even more heartbreaking to know they may not have sufficient backing to survive even a lean first couple of weeks – and that was during the good times. To my relief, Doughnut Time is there, closed but with a notice on the door saying their doughnuts can be reached via Deliveroo. Maybe they’ll make it.

We’ve lost count of the number of restaurants we have seen installing many thousands of pounds-worth of gleaming kitchen equipment, only to see it torn out and tossed into skips as the new owners decide on different ovens, fridges and sinks – more thousands of pounds, for who knows how long this time.

I see hardly anyone on the streets. Occasional knots of delivery men, leaning on their pushbikes and motor bikes, gather on corners chatting and paying no attention to social distancing. I am masked and most people smile at me benignly, except for one squat man who deliberately bends down to unleash his even squatter bulldog right in front of me, hoping, I feel, to scare me. I smile at them both behind my mask.

In the windows of padlocked sex shops, once the mainstay of Soho, are reflected the patisseries and chocolate shops that have taken their place. I was sad about that gentrification once but today I’m glad to be back on Soho’s streets, whatever their character, and long to see them thronging with life again.